Reviews (6)

I enjoy this subject, it felt like it gave me a new pair of eyes in looking at my surroundings as I was forced to see something in so many different perspectives. I learned a lot on how to take good quality pictures, used different lightings to create different feelings in pictures. It's very enjoyable.
Although, the projects can be frustrating as different tutors demands different things. Can get quite pricey too as you have to print out your images every week to bring into the tutorial.
But the tutors are very resourceful, they provide consultation time every week to make sure we're on track with the project.

All up I did find the course quite subjective and more wishy-washy. Like the first tut was asking which milk bottle was more majestic, like seriously. But in the long term the assignments were predominantly about visual elements which so many people stubbled with despite the tutor helped with examples of it all the time. I found it to be really easy marks if you just follow those manta sheets they hand out on the first tut. They are great with feedback as they even have one on one sessions that you can book on blackboard or just bring prints to the tut.

So many useful things they could teach in a course called 'Introduction to Visual Communication'......and UQ goes with 'Instagram 1010' and give a vague assignment with the most subjective marking ever where your grade depends on the mood of your marker that day and if they felt 'moved' by your photo. Absolutely useless and a complete joke and one of the reasons I'm dropping the PR/Comm part of my degree.

Don't listen to them when they say you don't need to buy fancy photography equipment...take your pictures on your phone and get hammered in your grade because got forbid someone on a student budget with no interest in photography doesn't want to invest in a $1k+ SLR camera....

COMU1999 was a core subject in my degree (B Communication), and so I needed to take it to graduate. I found the lectures useless, and I stopped going after two. The tutorials were incredibly useful though, and it was really important to attend these because it's where you learned everything you needed for the assessment. My tutor (I can't remember his name) was fantastic. He made sure that everyone in the class was getting the hang of all the techniques and that the photos for our assignments were going well/how we could improve them. I probably would have struggled if I didn't go!

The compulsory video editing software that we needed to use was Premiere Pro. I had never used it before, and although it took me a little while to get used to it, I soon figured out everything I needed to get my assignment done (Youtube tutorials helped a lot). I think it's really valuable to learn how to use new things, and I actually ended up needing it for other courses later in my degree.

The assessment was the best though. You just need to take photos. Literally. I mean, yeah, you have to turn it into a video.. but it's just a video slideshow of photos with a little blurb. The first assessment piece was quite specific in what you needed to do, which was a good starter piece for the subject I thought. Like, it got you into the hang of things. The second was basically a first draft of your final piece. The final piece was a series of photos of literally whatever you want. I spent most of the semester taking photos of my cat.

This is one of those courses I had to take as it was a core requirement for my degree and if I didn't need it it graduate, I would have dropped it. What I didn't like about this course was how incredibly subjective the assessment is. For example, one of the tasks was to take photographs that symbolise the 'emotional journey' of being a UQ student, which is something that can be interpreted in many different ways, and many people got low marks because the marker didn't like how they'd interpreted the task even though the directions were incredibly vague and left open for interpretation.

I also feel as though teaching finer points of photography doesn't have a lot of relevance the career path of most people in the Bachelor of Communication degree and that there would be more useful and beneficial things that could be taught as visual communication, such as advertising basics, rather than the finer points of photography. I also had to learn to use a specific type of software that I'll never use again, and would have benefitted more from learning the basics of something standard.

My lecturer was also particularly critical of people's photographic skills even though the course claimed that it was not about the actual photographic ability itself, and those who didn't have access to fancy photographic equipment seemed to be given lower grades. I also found the staff largely unwilling to assist during studio sessions, saying 'you received a demonstration in the lecture', but without understanding that a short demonstration of complex photographic techniques is not enough for a novice photographer to understand and be able to recreate them with virtually no practise.

As a result, I felt like I had to spend much more time on this course than other courses at the same level.

I felt like this subject, although an interesting introduction to visual communication, was very subjective, especially when it came to assessment.
The lecturer and tutors made clear assessment requirements, and were available for consultation often, especially around assessment time.

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